On any given day, Elon Musk is worth about a trillion dollars. This does not mean that he has a trillion dollar bills sitting in an old-timey vault in a dusty basement somewhere; his wealth is mostly tied up in shares of SpaceX and Tesla. But if he were to cash those out, sell Neuralink and the Boring Company, and scrounge together some extra change, his checking account would hit 13 digits.

“Trillionaire” is an easy enough word to say. It’s fun, even! Rolls off the tongue. But research has shown that the human brain has a very hard time comprehending the actual size and scope of large numbers. “Trillion” sounds like a short hop from “billion,” after all, even though it is in fact 1,000 times bigger. And even if you are somehow able to wrap your mind around that immense scale, it still feels abstract, no matter how many times you compare it to the area of Central Park or the weight of a fleet of trucks. Maybe a better way to visualize a trillion dollars, then, is through what you can actually buy with it.

WIRED has partnered with Neal Agarwal, the proprietor of the consistently delightful website Neal.fun, to do just that. Spend Elon Musk’s Money is a new visualization that lets you, well, spend Elon Musk’s money, on anything from Big Macs to aircraft carriers to the Las Vegas Sphere. It keeps a tally as you go, so you can actually see how far a trillion dollars gets you these days, and it shows the items you’ve bought in a physical space.

WIRED spoke with Agarwal about this new project, why it feels so relevant now, and the state of building things on the web. You can read that interview below, and waste a few hours on Spend Elon Musk’s money right here. This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

WIRED: I’ve known about Neal.fun for a long time, I’m a big fan. But describe it for someone who’s never been there.

Neal Agarwal: I never wanted to constrain the site to one thing, so it ended up being almost like a journal at this point. I’ve been running it since I was 19, and it’s kind of a catalog of everything I’m interested in: visualizations, science, weird game mechanics. For me, it’s mostly an exploration of what you can do with a website.

Why is that important to you, the idea of exploring what a website is and means? If there’s one thing I know about you it’s that you love the web.

Very much so. I grew up on the web; I was 8 years old on forums. I probably spent more time in Club Penguin than any real-world walls. I’m definitely a child of the web, and it’s interesting that I’m around the same age as it. It’s a privilege. Painters are working in a medium that’s a thousand years older, a million years older, so a lot of things have already been found out, been fleshed out. But on the web there’s so much that we haven’t figured out yet. I think there’s still a lot of new stuff to discover, and that’s really interesting to me.

I think every medium has distinct things you can do with it. You can turn a book into a movie but it’s not quite the same. There are some things a book is always going to be better at, and vice versa. I think that’s true of the web too. This visualization we’re working on, you can’t print it in a newspaper.

I suspect people might be familiar with some of your individual projects, if not your site itself. To list some off that are huge in my household: The Password Game, Space Elevator, The Deep Sea, Infinite Craft. When something goes viral, as so many of these have, what’s it like on your end? Is it almost boring now to see things blow up?

I think each project has been very different. The ones that excite me the most now are where a lot of people play it and start doing things with it that I did not expect or intend. Within a few days of Infinite Craft launching, people started crafting Japanese words within the game. And they crafted enough Japanese words that they could play the whole game in Japanese. I’ve never released a game before where they unlocked a language.

I had another one called Internet Road Trip; it’s like a simulated road trip but through Google Street View. A Discord formed around that, and people started backseat driving and arguing over which city to go to next, should they make a pit stop here so they can see this monument. People started birdwatching within that game. All these emergent things started happening, and I think the web is really good at that, too. It’s really good at forming communities out of the silliest things, which I find really exciting.

There’s also this contrast with a more closed-off app environment; you don’t really work in apps as a medium.

When I was a teenager I did make some apps, but I always really disliked that Apple and Google had to approve what I could put in them, and you have to wait a week for approval, and if they don’t like your app you have no recourse. So just the idea of having a homepage where it’s like, this is my homepage. Nobody can tell me what to do with it. I can put whatever I want.

We should talk about this visualization, Spend Elon Musk’s Money. It’s sort of a sequel to Spend Bill Gates’ Money, which was one of your first projects, right?

That actually launched with the website itself. I just wanted to showcase how much $100 billion was, which I guess now seems like a little amount of money compared to the trillion we’re working with.

It’s almost quaint, right? The premise is you’ve got a $100 billion counter and a bunch of things you can buy with prices attached to them: a Big Mac, flip-flops, a lobster dinner, a year of Netflix, all the way up to things like a diamond ring, a Ferrari, a McDonald’s franchise, and then up again to the Mona Lisa. And you just keep trying to add it up. What was the response to that game when it first launched?

It was one of the biggest things I’ve launched, and it was really nice to see that the point got across. People understood that this is a way to visualize wealth that isn’t just graphs and bar charts. The game kept finding a new audience over and over again; it was an idea that kept being interesting to people.

And then we come to 2026, and we have a trillionaire in the world, and it felt like maybe the right time to revisit.

Yeah, I think so. There’s a lot more you can do to visualize that, too. That’s why this one is 3D. I think one thing with Spend Bill Gates’ money is, yeah, you can buy 10,000 cars, but it’s still a number on a screen. With Spend Elon Musk’s Money, I want you to see the cars you’re buying on a screen. The amount of physical stuff you can buy—it is an empire.

One thing that I certainly have a hard time with, and I think most people do, is really wrapping your head around what a trillion is. There’s been research that humans are really bad at processing how big the jumps are even from 1 billion to 2 billion, much less getting up to a trillion. Our brains just break.

I think that’s one thing the web is actually really good at, is that you have infinite space. You can visualize these numbers in ways that you can’t do in the physical world. Even for my project The Deep Sea, it’s a 1:1 of the ocean. If you wanted to print that out on paper, it would be a mile long, but on the web you can just keep scrolling and scrolling. So it’s kind of fun to have this infinite scroll mechanic to visualize these huge numbers.

Some of the items carry over from Spend Bill Gates Money, some are different. How did you think about the best mix of options to give people?

This time I was going for more tangible things, so you can visualize it. It’s honestly hard to think of items; once you get to $100 million, there are only so many things out on the market that you can buy. So we have the Las Vegas Sphere in there, and aircraft carriers.

After a point it’s kind of interesting that you’re like, OK, I could buy 1,000 more tanks, what would that really get me? Part of the fun of this one is just the futility of it. At a certain point, what more could a person need?

For sure. I just bought 1,000 monster trucks, and I still have $999,650,000 left.

There were a few different ideas. One is if you had a trillion dollars and just had a stack of money, and as you spend it you see the trillion dollars go down, but it’s actually pretty hard to render a trillion dollars in bills on the page.

I had thoughts of more abstract things. Once you get to a trillion dollars you’re really buying power, so how many companies you could buy or how much influence you have. But for most people, that’s a harder way to visualize things than, like, oh, that is a million racehorses I just bought. Did you run into any technical challenges building this?

Initially I wanted everything to be 3D models on the site. But if you try to get your laptop to render a million monster trucks, it’s just going to freeze. So I had to do a lot of trickery to get this 3D effect without actually using 3D models.

It doesn’t just tell us about Elon Musk, it tells us about the things we’re buying. I looked back at the original Spend Bill Gates’ Money, and the Big Mac was $2. It’s $6 now. For anything where there’s a direct parallel, you’ve captured a real price jump.

It’s very inflation-adjusted. Which is crazy, because it’s only been six or seven years. If anyone has any recommendations about other items we should add to this, just let me know.